Gone Girl is an impressively tense procedural thriller. And it’s a brilliant black comedy. But it is neither of those things at the same time. What it is, throughout, is the latest effort by director David Fincher to suss out the meaning of modern American life.
Fincher’s The Game (1997), Fight Club (1999), and Gone Girl comprise a triptych of films dedicated to the idea that modern life is, at its heart, a performance. Disrupting that performative aspect—shaking things up to create a new perspective, a new point of view—is the only way to see what truly matters.
The Game focuses on a fabulously wealthy investment banker who pays for the privilege of being systematically deprived of property and autonomy until he realizes he is his father’s son—but doesn’t have to wind up like him. "Do not call [the company running the game] to figure out the object of the game," our protagonist is warned. "Discovering the object of the game is the object of the game." And in Fight Club, a middle class insomniac’s mental breakdown is the background for a critique of consumer culture. "The things you own end up owning you. … It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything," Tyler Durden famously says, two remarkably funny lines to hear while watching a 42 inch plasma TV perched on top of an Ikea TV table in the middle of a home in the D.C. ’burbs.
Gone Girl hits on many of the same themes from those films—the emptiness of consumerism, the irreconcilable nature of our public and private faces—but does so in a much more personal way. Fincher isn’t dealing with plutocrats or freshman philosophy majors in Gone Girl. He’s in your home. Worse, he’s in your bedroom. He’s in your recession, your cable news obsessions, your creaking, collapsing, counterfeit marriage. And he’s picking it all apart, strand by delicate strand.
Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) are married in the suburbs of St. Louis. While having an early-morning drink at the local watering hole that he owns and for which his sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), tends bar, a distraught-seeming Nick gets a call to come home.
A neighbor has spotted Nick and Amy’s cat wandering around outside. The front door is open. A glass table has been smashed. Amy is gone. Nick calls the cops.
Thus begins Nick’s nightmare. Det. Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens) finds blood in the house. Nick can’t answer her questions about Amy: he doesn’t know what she does for fun while he’s gone during the day, he doesn’t know who her friends are, he doesn’t know much. Is it ignorance or evasion? Our own sense of unease is not helped by the fact that we are presented with a pair of utterly unreliable narrators: Nick, of course, could have something to hide, and Amy’s side of the story comes from a diary read to us in voiceover, the provenance of which we are not made aware of until the film’s second half.
Cable news vultures increase the pressure on Nick and his in-laws. Amy served as the basis for "Amazing Amy," the lead character in a series of popular children’s books. Her semi-celebrity heightens the scrutiny on Nick, the media subjecting his every smile and twitch to constant insta-analysis. Fincher’s contempt for cable news is unrelenting: We see the media take brief moments out of context in order to generate headlines and whip up the mob, a presumed tragedy manufactured and massaged and repackaged into entertainment. And then, as the walls close in and Nick begins to buckle from the pressure, everything changes. (Spoilers to follow.)
The film’s first half is a twisty, moody whodunit, a dark psychological thriller. And then, abruptly, we shift gears: Amy is alive. She’s driving down the highway, spilling the beans in voiceover about her plan to frame her husband for murder. The tension disappears. Humor rushes in to fill the vacuum; in addition to seeing Amy’s exploits, we are introduced to cable-friendly defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry), who takes Nick on as a client. We have gone from a dark thriller to a dark comedy, an absurd, Kafkaesque meditation on the nature of justice in an utterly unjust, utterly uncaring world.
We come to understand that Amy is a sociopath who believes she had constructed the perfect little world for herself. She had played the "cool girl" in order to woo a man before molding him into the partner she has been taught by society she deserves: caring, loving, obedient. The Great Recession shattered that illusion. Both Nick and Amy lost their jobs as writers in New York and the poor little rich girl whose mom’s success filled her trust fund is forced to empty it out and sell the Brownstone her novelistic namesake bought.
Unable to maintain the façade and desperately unhappy about the pair’s move to flyover country care for Nick’s sick mother, Amy uses the media and consumer culture to teach Nick a lesson—one that could culminate in a lethal injection.
Gone Girl is the sort of film that works beat to beat, moment to moment. Despite its 149 minute running time, it never drags. Whether the audience is trying to follow the twists and turns in the film’s first half or darkly chuckling about Nick’s predicament in the second half, its attention is rapt. The performances are all great. Pike is justifiably getting some Oscar buzz, but I’d like to throw a little love Kim Dickens’ way; I’ll be shocked if there’s a better supporting female performance this year.
The whole product feels a bit disjointed, however. The abrupt shift in tone and perspective cause a sort of cinematic whiplash. While this problem may be less pronounced on repeat viewings, the uninitiated should be forgiven for feeling jerked around a bit.
As I noted earlier, Fincher seems as interested in realigning our perceptions as telling a story. And he has done so in a different way in each part of his triptych. The Game broke down the mind of its protagonist ("You want to know what it is, what it’s all about? … John. Chapter Nine. Verse twenty-five … whereas I was blind, now I can see"). Fight Club broke down the body ("A guy came to fight club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood. … Fight club became the reason to cut your hair short and trim your fingernails"). Gone Girl, meanwhile, breaks down the social ties binding us together; after spending a week being examined externally from every angle by a female detective, his twin sister, his mother in law, and a Nancy Grace-like cable host, Nick frustratedly cries, "I am so sick of being picked apart by women!"
I do rather dread the inevitable Oscar-season shouting matches about perceptions of misogyny in Gone Girl as competing producers use the weapons of political correctness to hurt its chances. (See: Zero Dark Thirty, Argo.) Amy falsely accuses men of rape, attempts to frame her husband for murder, henpecks without end, and then, finally, traps Nick into staying with her by getting pregnant. That’s a veritable buffet of offenses from the potentially aggrieved to choose from. And Nick’s frustration at being picked apart seems a not-so-distant echo of Tyler Durden’s ethos: "We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer we need."
Not if it’s a woman like Amy Dunne. We should all be able to agree that's one girl you’d be glad to see gone.